I’ve just got back from tonights UK CFUG meeting with Ben Forta at City University in London. Overall, a good night with Ben talking for a couple of hours about the current Flex Beta and some ancillary topics.
Covered were many topics:
- Flex Builder 2 - This is currently in Beta 1 with Beta 2 apparently only a few days away. Ben wouldn’t give any dates for a full release, and the official line is “Mid-Year”, although I did spot that Ben’s Beta 2 install had 73 days until expiry which puts it May/June time. Pricing, as mentioned in other blogs, is said to be below $1000, whilst the framework and compiler (bundled in the SDK) and being handed out for free.
- Mystic - The Coldfusion 7.0.1 updater. This includes a new remoting engine and enables push/pull of data between CF and Flex using JMS.
- Data Synchronizing Services - A new cool gadget that controls multiple users updating the same data at the same time and helping them sort out any problems caused by them overwriting eah other.
- Flash Player 8.5 - Ben spoke about the massive performance improvements to be found in 8.5, and also the inclusion of the original FP8 virtual machine (in addition to the new 8.5 VM) to make sure there is 100% backward compatability.
- Planned Flex/Livecycle integration.
- A brief mention of CF8, better know by the name Scorpio, which include a raft of monitoring, analysis and performance probing tools.
- A brief mention of Jrun, which is undergoing development of a new version fully using Java 1.5 etc.
Nearly all of the above are available at http://labs.adobe.com
As always, Ben presented very well, and the CFUG had a whole load of questions which were answered very efficiently. Some of the demos were very good and showed how powerful Flex could be in the right hands. Unfortunately, Ben’s data services demo’s weren’t working at the time, but nevertheless, we got around these with a little imagination.
The general feedback from the group on Flex was one of excitement, with a couple of members remarking how “the mind boggled” at the possibilities that were now open. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Ben is back with us for another demonstration (hopefully of CF8 ;-)).
